Given the shrill attacks on the government's commitment to reinvigorating the APS, led by Angus Taylor, Jane Hume and Peter Dutton in the wake of the budget, the opposition should clarify its own vision for the future of the service immediately.
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While all three have been critical of the planned increase in the average staffing level by 12,041 places on top of the current 209,150, none of them have said what an LNP government would do in office.
Their responses, while strident, have been characterised by misinformation, Mr Taylor saying last Wednesday the government was hiring "an astonishing 36,000 additional bureaucrats in Canberra".
No. It's 12,000 additional jobs and it would appear the bulk of them - especially in the service delivery space - will be outside of Canberra in the regions and state and territory capitals.
Mr Dutton said he would preference defence over additional public servants, ignoring the fact almost 7000 new defence-related positions would be created in the next financial year as part of the Chalmers' budget.
Meanwhile, Jane Hume's comment the Coalition "is committed to providing a world-class public service with value for taxpayers' money" is cryptic enough to have been handed down by the Delphic oracle.
It's also hard to believe given in 2021-2022 the government, of which she was a member, blew almost $21 billion on an external workforce of 54,000 contractors and consultants.
"They had a shadow workforce that was off the books," is how current Finance Minister Katy Gallagher explained it.
"What we're trying to do is to take that shadow workforce, where we can, make them public servants, make us accountable and publish those details in the budget."
That is a worthy and admirable goal. It is also what responsible government should be all about.
In an interview with The Canberra Times, Government Services Minister Bill Shorten made it clear he has a strong personal commitment to reduce the amount of time it takes for somebody to get through to Centrelink, the NDIS, Medicare and other key government services.
Nearly $2 billion is to go to Government Services Australia over the next three years to put a lot more people behind the counters and on the phones.
"I think government services has been a bit of an underdog in political policy," Mr Shorten said.
"I think people working in government services and people using government services were treated as second-class citizens and that is unacceptable".
He's right. Millions of Australians rely on Medicare, Centrelink and the NDIS on a daily basis. They deserve prompt and professional service. And, not only that, the people providing that service shouldn't be forced to turn clients over at a ridiculous pace due to chronic understaffing thanks to a parsimonious approach to funding by Coalition governments whose first instinct has always been to slash and burn.
The main reason the Albanese government is having to invest so heavily in the APS is because of the damage wrought by almost a decade of Coalition neglect, indifference and sometimes outright hostility to what it likes to characterise as "the Canberra bureaucracy". Mr Dutton needs to come clean on whether or not he plans to repeat the mistakes of the past.
Given the well-known reluctance of leopards to change their spots, members of the APS have good reason to be suspicious of the opposition's intentions. Its form is not good.
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